1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to management of help desks, and in particular to a system which uses available communications channels for computerized system of help desk serving several facilities.
2. Description of Related Art
Organizations have missions which are the reason for their existence, workers to achieve these missions, systems, stocks, equipment, as well as facilities to host all of the above. Maintaining the facilities and the workers ability to function necessitates a team to provide a great variety of services which are not part of the organization core business. For example, an accounting firm needs printer paper, ink, fixing of broken fax machine, moving of tables and storage cabinets, etc. Usually, each service may be handled by a single handyman or a team of two-three handymen, part of which are non-professional workers while part are technical experts or technicians. For efficient operation of the organization there is a need to provide those services with as small as possible attention of workers and management, allowing them to concentrate on the core activities of the organization.
The team of workers providing those services should be kept small as it does not contribute to core activities of the organization. On the other hand, the team should include the handymen needed to comply with the service needs in a timely manner. To achieve both goals, organizations are using a service help desk. The help desk is a center for receiving service calls, deciding which worker takes care of each service call and ordering the appropriate worker or workers to execute the necessary actions. The help desk saves time of works and management as no effort is needed to identify the right person in the organization to talk with about the service call. Also, the handymen are centrally managed, enabling efficient use of their time and specialization of certain workers in specific tasks for the whole facility or organization.
Help desk may be operated as “in house” service that the organization provides either separately for each facility, or for all the facilities of the organization, or at least for those facilities close enough to be served by the same help desk and/or same handyman team. Rather than having an “in house” help desk, an organization may outsource help desk services to an external company. Such a step removes help desk management out of the duties of the organization leadership, allowing more time and attention for dealing with the core business of the organization. Furthermore, the external service company may be organized on geographical basis, selling help desk services to several facilities of several organizations. Thus, it may serve several facilities of different organizations which are closely located, in a single industrial zone, for example. In such a location the service company may have quite a large workforce or handyman team, and thus be cost effective much more than the separate service department of each facility. In particular, separate facilities may have no enough activity to justify hiring a special technician for certain relatively rare service. In contrast, such a technician of the service company serves several facilities, and thus his employment becomes economically feasible.
Another advancement in the field of help desk is partial or full computerization of the help desk wherein a computer software functions as a help desk manager to at least some extent. A computerized in house help desk may be provided as a sub-system of a complex system for computerization of all the administrative and managerial activities of the organization, SAP™ for example. In such a case, the complex system may authorize users to make monetary commitments on behalf of the organization, and therefore security demands allow installation of the complex system on only part of the personal computers which serve employees. Moreover, due to the security demands the installation itself is a time consuming process necessitating time and attention. Besides, once installed, the system allows a worker to issue a service call only from her computer.
Referring to communicating with handymen, the communication channel to an handyman is usually by cellular phone calls. However, the handyman is usually in the field working on a former service call. Immediate response to a phone call may disturb his work, while retrieving a reserved message and returning a call may be a waste of his time.
Thus, there is a need to for a simple and friendly system for help desk management, allowing a user easy approach for issuing a service call and enabling convenient approach to handymen.